27th Birthday!

Haha It's my bday! so this is the gay thing I decided to post for it. Picasa came up with this automatic face tagging thing, pretty cool! u can do that with a single click.

Enough advertising lol I shall post here my gratitude to my mum. I can't even start explaining how much she's done for me, it's off chops. Thanks mum! I literally wouldn't be here without u.

I still sound like a kid don't I? It's like I left to Australia when I was 20 and here I am now living like a drop out 21yo lol it rocks in a way.. knowing that I'll be back to my easygoing lifestyle in Aus by January this isn't really a problem, but it's scary to know I wouldn't have anywhere to start if I ever wanted to work here for a while.

For every bridge we build, we burn one.

Ipanema sesh

I often fantasize about being 2 people at the same time.. that would come in handy, specially so I could take photos of my own surfing haha
The truth is I have serious trouble getting surfing shots. For the amount of time I surf, I should have heaps more photos.. Anyway, I got lucky, Omar is pretty much a second me! kinda like a brother but without even fighting. It would suck to have all these days I spend in Rio with no commitments at all if he wasn't in town. Not to mention all the stuff to do at night I would never know about in this huge city if he didn't hook me up.
People usually wait too long to say thanks, but I'll leave my appreciation registered here to this mofo. Thanks for being there bro

What a fun day

Nice offshore day in Barra. It did look better than it really was though, definitely.

Diabo firing

Inside gem in Leblon

Omar after getting a few bombs

yeeow

Chilling with some of the boys.. bloody iphone camera

So I went back to Rio with a few new stories and a lot to catch up on. My nose was far from healed, the doctor told me to wait 40 days. It was more like 4 days till I was back out there. The chances of hitting my nose on the board are minimal.

Since I wasn't 100% anyway I took the opportunity to sort myself out.. been doing pilates, physio, eating heaps well, even had my teeth whitened haha. But all of it whilst going out pretty much every night and surfing everyday.

It was a good come back with great partying and surfing plus lots of friends to enjoy it with.

Garuti's Party definitely takes the trophy... 50 chicks for 10 guys at his sick penthouse overlooking Leblon and enough free Vodka for a lifetime to be mixed with any fruit under the sun. It's good to be home afterall.

One more photoshop atrocity, as a transition this time… After that many mild, touristy, surfless pictures, this comes refreshing, bringing back the boysh atmosphere of this blog

Lisbon - Portugal

The following (and last) day was mild in comparison to it, but I was in a high for some reason. We kept it simple after so many days full of missions. Lunch was casual Temaki, then some shopping, a visit to a castle and a very decent grand finale at the best restaurant in Lisbon. Olivier I’m pretty sure the name is. That was an experience apart… the way they serve is unreal. 3 bottles of wine are kept open at all times so we can vary all we want. They give us 5 entrees for tasting all amazing stuff like octopus carpaccio, crab with guacamole, canapés, etc. I had a beef tartare, a bit too seasoned but all good. After that final meal I felt like eating shit food for a change haha

Back in Lisbon after 3 days of suffering, I was counting the minutes to have that thing out of my nose. If I knew that he was going to pull it out and tell me to rest with that plaster on, I would’ve done it myself. The pulling out part was the only painful bit of the whole process counting with the punch itself, but it was bearable.

I was pretty much reborn once those tubes were gone. Talking was so easy, breathing was pure, food tasted amazing! The only down was that I was looking like shit, but I learned how to act as an ugly(er) person and got through that day quite happily.

We checked in at a hostel and I finally got to stay in a room alone! What a relief, so many good things happening in one day. It’s funny how they were nothing but reacquired goods/rights/faculties, but getting them back felt just as good as conquering something new due to how crucial they are.

The next day was the best of the whole trip. I woke up and decided I didn't need to wear that stupid plaster on my nose anymore. Looking (almost) normal again, we had breakfast at the hostel and met a group of Italians who told us about a nice beach to go. Fed, we went for a major drive to a castle first then to that beach, on the Atlantic (it was surfable!) and had a fat duck for lunch there.

To top it up, I got to catch up with Rafa. My sister, him and I had a few beers and went to have dinner with our family. How funny is that guy! After laughs and wine all night we went back to the Hostel for a few drinks. I was stoked to make it up to Cecilia and Julia (Calito’s daughters) after 3 days acting like a rotten mummy and unable to speak to them.

We met a chick from Rio as well, she as travelling on her on own and staying at the hostel. After a few caipirinhas we all headed out to Bairro Alto, a place where everyone drinks in the streets in Lisbon, unreal. I met a few of Rafael’s mates, they were all telling me about how shitty that Docks place is and no one goes there and Publish Postthere’s fights all the time and blah blah.. yeah I guess I fucked up, but it didn't take very long till I was laughing at it.

We had a ball, a genuinely well spent night drinking with people I like. We ended up at a club at around 2am. It was all time!

A great photo of nothing

My sister went shopping for more appropriate clothes for me to go out in Portugal

It took me like 2 hours to eat this with those tubes in my nose. Only motivation is that it tasted even better than it looks.

haha still learning a thing or 2 on photoshop.. I did it to relieve some frustration

The original shot, pissed off at the hospital toilet holding an ice filled glove and my iphone lol

As warned, I was barred for being on my own. Someone told me about a different joint, called The Docks, so that’s where I headed, in spite of the taxi driver’s efforts to convince me to go to a strip joint.

This place looked pretty wild, it was already 3am and there were about 6 small clubs next to each other going off. I picked one called Hawaii and copped a £20 cover charge. The beer was only £2.50 so I was going hard on it. Only after I was Already smashed I realized that the entry fee was actually a voucher to be consumed there. Oh well, had to drink another 8 beers on top of it.

I had enough and walked out of the club blind, but my toughts were all over the place. I stopped outta front and something in there caught my drunken eye so I tried to get back in. The bouncer said it was 5am lock out. I should’ve known.. I was still hanging around smashed when I saw the door unattended and sneaked in. They told me to get out as I was talking to a chick, I pretended to go but kept crapping on to her. I saw a hand grabbing my arm and prepared myself for a flight out the door, but instead of throwing me, they hit me in the face dry. It didn’t really hurt and I couldn’t even tell what part was hit, but the amount of blood coming out was freaky. I was drinking lots of it, the taste was… so natural. I didn’t get a good visual of the bouncer, I was out in the street on my own bleeding like crazy. It would be an understatement to say that no one gave a crap. I wonder if that happens every night in Portugal. I walked over to the main road and found a few cops after people refused to help. They called an ambulance and I asked a cop to come back with me and find the guy. All I wanted to do is kill, and the cop had a gun so I figured he could be useful. I wasn’t thinking that straight… The bouncer was gone. Another fight broke out as we were looking for him so the cop went to contain it and I hopped on the ambulance.

The bleeding was still at full force, unbelievable. I always wondered what it was like to get punched in the face by someone who wants to cause as much damage as possible. In the Ambulance, all I wanted to know is why the fuck did that bouncer do it. Was it really necessary? The teeth count was sweet, so I figured it was my nose. That’s when the thoughts of deformation begun. I wanted to know what it looked like now, but more than anything, I wanted to kill that fucker.

It didn’t take long till we were in the hospital. I checked in and saw myself on my own in a waiting room being tortured by my killing instinct. After looking at my nose, I was on the ground hitting my own thigh and swearing my lungs out. This went on for an hour. I eventually got up and went to a different room, where 2 guys were coming from the same place, one with a broken nose as well. They called me in not long after that. A Portuguese doctor roughly straightened my nose with his bare hands without much of a warning. It didn’t hurt at all… but I knew that it wasn’t a final solution. My mum arrived once my nose looked more presentable. I waited with her for another 2 hours and went back in to surgery to get more manual nasal remodelling and 2 10cm tubes as thick as my pinky shoved into my nose. I thought they only did it for the operation, but the order was to keep that thing in there for 3 days.

I left the hospital unable to breath with my nose, and what was worse, knowing I wouldn’t for 3 days. I had no idea how hard everything becomes when you exclude this simple faculty. Swallowing means an internal convulsion, your ear threatens exploding every time you do it. Talking is not even worth it. Eating? You’re joking me, starving sounds more attractive.

Julia and Cecilia joined us. I was worried I might really get in the way of the carefully crafted travel plans they had put together. If I was well enough to debate, I would ask them to just leave me in the hospital for a few days.

We were in the car heading north only about 6 hours after the punch. At least the rented car was comfortable enough. I was meant to catch up With Rafa, a dear friend I met in Indonesia 2 years before, but in those conditions I called it off. In fact, I called everything off. We visited 3 cities in 3 days. This means 3 different hotels and a lot of driving. My only criteria were the thickness of the pillows and the speed of the Internet connection in each hotel. It feels like I wasted my chance of checking out Peninche, Coimbra and Guimaraes, but I really didn’t have a choice.